Schedule

©David Fox, She's Ready to Pop, blown glass, mixed media, 2007

©Amy Hunter, Hindrance, glass steel sutures, pig intestine, 2007

The theme of "transformation" unites the work of 28 internationally recognized and emerging artists who are using a wide range of techniques and materials - forms rooted in traditional craft materials and processes, as well as art that explores relationships between craft and painting, sculpture and installation - to transform glass into contemporary art. The methods associated with glass - blowing, casting, slumping, hot sculpting, etching and painting, etc. - are combined with materials such as aluminum, bone, gears, and found objects. The Raphael Founder's Prize is a biennial award established in 1997 to showcase artists who are expanding the boundaries in their field through new techniques, ideas, and approaches to their medium. This Elizabeth R. Raphael Founder's Prize Exhibition was organized by the Society for Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Glass embodies an idea about communication - "transparency" especially relevant in our society today. The artists demonstrate shades of clarity through social, political and personal reflections, for example: Jen Blazina's full-scale, glass school classroom; Dan Cutrone's meditation on Michelangeleo's Sistine Ceiling seen through contemporary science; Michael Crowder's evocation of enshrinement and decay in ghost-like insects; Michael Roger's homage to Nabokov within a free-standing display case with an old fashioned typewriter, butterfly collection and writings; Tim Wagner's rats bloated by "government cheese;" and Amy Rueffert's curios conflating Victorian and sixties domesticity.

Five artists from the Northwest star in the exhibition: Robert Carlson, Bainbridge Island; Paul Marioni, Seattle; Kait Rhoads, Seattle; Robert Snyder, Vashon; and Mark Zirpel, Seattle. Pair by Zirpel, the Raphael top award winner, evokes the fragile nature of interconnected relationships through a Harlequinesque installation involving machinery, water and body parts.

Hideout, ©Adam Sorenson, 64 x 47 Oil on linen, 2009	Construction II, ©Margaretha Bootsma, 24 x 24 Mixed media on panel, 2009

The National Endowment for the Arts has granted the Western Gallery partial funding to present a multi-media, multi-venue exhibition exploring how artists are responding to the natural, diverse Pacific Northwest in the context of a rapidly changing environment and gathering crisis of degradation. The artistic theme of an ongoing dialectical relationship between man and nature in the Northwest in the past has ranged from the early, mystic painters of the 1940s-1950s to the land-based art of the late 1960s-1970s, climaxing in the 1979 national symposium "Earthworks. Land Reclamation as Sculpture" (King County Arts Commission). While attention has been paid to land-based art and public art involving community based-ecological projects, it is time for critical analysis of artists who are newly engaged in a dialogue on the environment in more traditional places as galleries and museums.

This exhibition focuses on twenty-six artists who are concerned with the issues and contemporary conditions of the environment in the Northwest. These artists draw on both the environmental politics long associated with the Northwest and the artistic history of these issues in the regional and national scene. In their approaches some of these contemporary artists face the critical issues head on: growth management as seen in the urban/rural conflict; the connection of transportation and urban sprawl; contested sources of energy; mass production and consumption; toxic management of land, watersheds and waters; and dramatic climate change. Others accent environmental values such as preservation of wilderness and wetlands, sustainability, and biodiversity as well as work out the strategy of artist and nature as co-agents. Finally, some artists enhance current conditions and challenges through the use of an apocalyptic rendering. In this exhibition the viewer will not only have a chance to see the overlapping causes and effects of the issues in artworks but also to hear the resounding voices of our artistic messengers.

Organized by Sarah Clark-Langager, Director, Western Gallery, and John Olbrantz, Director, Halle Ford Museum, Willamette University, the exhibition will have a catalogue with essays by the curator, Sarah Clark-Langager, and award winning environmental journalist, William Dietrich. Artists’ statements will accompany the illustrations of their work.